Sarah Woodfine
 
 
Untitled (Branch) II  2015  pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex  72 x 24 x 24 cm
photograph by Peter White
 


Sarah Woodfine is an artist, educator and curator who lives and works in both London and the Isle of Portland in Dorset. She is currently Course Leader for B.A Sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. She has taught and undertaken residencies internationally including Emily Carr University, Vancouver and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh USA.

She has an interdisciplinary practice that is rooted in the process of drawing in its expanded form. Engagement with the material nature of drawing is explored three dimensionally into sculptural form, asking questions about the nature of materiality in relation to perception. At times Woodfine works collaboratively with groups and communities, utilizing drawing as a starting point to interrogate personal narratives, histories and folklore myths through her relationship with these subjects. She is currently working on a commission researching and reinterpreting specific stone works within the Tout Sculpture Quarry Park, Portland Dorset.

Woodfine’s work touches both on our mainstream ideas about moral behaviour – what is good, right, desirable and true, and upon repressed or otherwise obscured drives, intentions or beliefs. These “drawing-sculptures” – for they are both these things at one and the same time – operate at a level that is realistic though imaginary, being pictures formed of natural elements distended or distorted so as to assume a fantastic otherness, a striking strangeness that simultaneously seduces and repels. — Peter Suchin

 
Curriculum vitae
Exhibitions at the gallery:

Mercurious  2019, We can hardly imagine how much the angels love the truly chaste  2015, VOLTA NY  2015, Enclosure  2014, Glass Cat  2013, So That I may Come Back  2010, Riddle Me  2008, The Drawn Curtain  2006, Staged  2005, Transmogrifications  2005, Great Piece of Turf  2003, In Splendid Isolation  2002, Five Years  2000, Perfume  1998, Works on paper  1997.

 
Press
 
Text
 
SELECTED WORKS
Just as the fire burns away all dross and rubbish, so the three-fold suffering purges the heart from all impurity
2019  bronze  60 x 60 x 5cm
 Sarah Woodfine, Just as the fire burns away all dross and rubbish, so the three-fold suffering purges the heart from all impurity, Bronze, 2019, 60x60x5cm
 
Untitled (Forest)
2016  pencil on paper, MDF, perspex   16 x 140 x 15cm
 Sarah Woodfine, Untitled (Forest), 2016, pencil on paper, mdf, perspex, 16 x 140 x 15


But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out. - Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves,” from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

This idea of keeping out the wolves, of trying to restrain the uncontainable, is entrenched in our relaying of fairytales. Stories, myths and tales may physically be contained within the bindings of books but their most potent telling is through the mouths of others. They exist in oral histories, with their books remaining as material reference points, words spilling out of the sides. As Angela Carter retells the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood in her short story “The Company of Wolves”, Sarah Woodfine retells, interprets and revises both stories in her work Untitled (Forest), mirroring the mutation that the story undergoes when passed from mouth to mouth.

Woodfine plays on the (im)possibilities of containment here, with the forest enclosed within the parameters of the art display. Its perspex box seals its world, allowing viewers visual entry but safeguarding them from the wolves within. Blurring the boundaries between drawing and sculpture, between the three dimensional and the two dimensional, Woodfine creates a stage set on which the viewer can remember the chill of a cracking twig in an uninhabited woodland, of wolfish eyes piercing between your ribs. The sinister nature of the beast is alluded to here but undercut by Woodfine’s characters that straddle both the human and the wolfish, emerging as creatures in drag. In this hybridity, Woodfine both dispels the hierarchy between human and animal and alludes to the human tendency to dress up our violence and mask its primacy.

With the neatly cut tops of trees and amputated limbs, (bandaged feet and stumps where hands once were, take centre stage), executed with Woodfine’s sharp monochrome pencil, we could believe that these cuts were clean. But with the red cloaked by the graphite trees and seeping from between the legs of the central wolf, a mother figure perhaps, we see that even the forest cannot camouflage its violence and its loss. We are privy to the underbelly of the forest here and its cannibalistic nature. Woodfine’s forest is a site of the unconscious; a place of transformation but also reparation. The wolves look towards the malevolant figure on the right, anticipating their own transitions through the stages of the moon until they enter the snarl of its madness, limbs intact. - Tess Charnley

 
When all the birds are in the sky
2015  pencil on paper and steel  dimensions variable
photograph by Peter White
 
 
Untitled (Branch) I
2015  pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex  72 x 24 x 24 cm
photograph by Peter White
 
 
 
Untitled (Branch) III
2015  pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex  72 x 24 x 24 cm
photograph by Peter White
 
 
Untitled (Branch) IV
2015  pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex  72 x 24 x 24 cm
photograph by Peter White
 
 
 
Stem
2015  pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex  90 x 49 x 49 cm
photograph by Peter White
 
 
 
Forever and ever
2015  pencil on paper and aluminium  32 cm diameter
photograph by Peter White
 
 
 
We can hardly imagine how much the angels love the truly chaste
2015  pencil on paper, canford card, found object  16 x 12 x 12 cm
photograph by Peter White
 
 
How to grow an apple tree
2014  plant stand, plant pot, pencil on Saunders Waterford paper  150 x 32 x 32 cm
 
 
 
I would do anything for love
2013  steel axe head, pencil on paper, MDF  85 x 48 x 48 cm
 
Recipe for a kiss of shame
2012  pencil on paper, MDF  120 x 220 x 40 cm

 
 
Darling Trust Me It's For The Best
2010  pencil on paper, MDF, Formica, enamel paint, hammer head
 
 
Crypt
2010  pencil on paper  30 x 21 x 21 cm